Page 69 of Sweet Obsession

Never used it when the cameras could see. Never when Misha was near. But even then, I felt his presence like a storm waiting to break.

I lunged for it, fingers trembling.

Only one message.

The burial is set. Come now if you want to say goodbye. We’ll get you out.

Attached: an image.

The sigil was black ink and brutal lines—Yuri’s family mark. I remembered it from the days he used to sleep beside me, hand splayed over my ribs like he owned me.

I stared at the message until my vision blurred.

Yuri.

He turned into something dark. I never forgot that. But before that, before the power, the poison, he was someone who made me laugh when all I wanted was to disappear.

I wasn’t mourning the man he became. I was mourning the boy I once believed in. There were memories of him that weren’t soaked in blood.

I squeezed the phone so hard it creaked.

Was it betrayal? To want to say goodbye?

Would Misha see it that way? Did he even trust me?

No.

There was no trust here. No freedom.

This wasn’t a marriage. It was a sentence, sealed in blood, inked in power and pain.

I wasn’t a wife. I was a transaction wrapped in silk.

A pawn dressed in gold.

But pawns?

They’re always the first to run. And I was so damn tired of waiting to be sacrificed.

The plan was simple.

At least, it sounded simple when it was whispered to me over a scrambled call, hours after the message from Yuri’s family reached me.

Slip out through the side gate. Cut through the north woods, where surveillance grew lazy. A car would be waiting on the old service road, engine hot, ready to vanish. Forty minutes to the airstrip.A charter flight fueled and waiting. Papers already forged.

By the time Misha realized I was missing... I’d be nothing more than a fading shadow on a screen.

If I could just get to Yuri’s grave. If I could say goodbye. If I could finally breathe without Misha’s ice-cold control coiled around my ribs.

I pressed a trembling hand to the stone wall near the servant’s exit, heart hammering like a prisoner begging for escape.

Don’t think. Just move.

But I remembered what happened last time, back in Colombia. The night he caught my sister and me trying to escape with Yuri’s help. The way he’d looked at me afterward, like I’d betrayed him, like I was the one wielding the knife.

Could I really do this?

After nearly an hour of hesitation and bitter self-recrimination, I finally slipped into the servants’ corridor.